There’s a moment towards the end of Don’t Look Back in Anger, the newly released documentary capturing Oasis’s 2025 reunion tour, that helps explain why those planet-conquering gigs happened in the first place. Liam and Noel Gallagher are sitting down together for the rarest of paired interviews – the first since the 2009 scrap that broke up the band and created such a huge appetite for their return. Had Oasis’s story ended with that backstage fight in Paris, both Gallaghers note, their legacy would have been one of astonishing success curtailed by “chaos”. Instead, those reunion gigs, as well as proving wildly lucrative, have allowed them to add a triumphant coda to that messy ending. “It feels like a weight has been lifted,” a surprisingly contemplative Liam says.
That maybe makes Don’t Look Back in Anger sound more navel-gazing than this entertaining and often very funny film is – as you might expect of any doc that features a sweary rumination from Noel on Liam’s ability to balance a tambourine on his head (“If I did that I’d look an utter cunt, but somehow he does it and it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen”). Still, for all the droll quippery and bucket-hatted euphoria, there is something poignant and self-reflective at the film’s heart: hatchets are buried, departed friends are toasted and legacies are contemplated. What you leave behind was clearly on the minds of the brothers Gallagher throughout the tour and film.
And there’s no better way of shoring up your legacy, if you’re a musician or band tiptoeing toward heritage status, than having a documentary made about you. As last year’s record-breaking Becoming Led Zeppelin proved, these are platinum-status times for the music doc and its close cousin the concert film (Don’t Look Back in Anger, with its extensive use of archive footage, is a mix of both). Go to the cinema most weeks and there will be at least one screening – by my count there have been more than 30 this year alone, ranging from gleaming high-definition gigs by K-pop superstars you’ve only just heard of (Enhypen, Stray Kids, Ateez), to archive-rich career retrospectives of acts entering their autumn years (from Megadeth to James) and immaculate restorations of fuzzily remembered gigs from artists no longer with us (Soul to Soul, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert). And that’s not including the many, many straight-to-streaming music docs and concert films, or scripted films – such as the box office-topping Michael Jackson biopic or the Green Day-authored coming-of-age comedy Nimrods – that serve the same reputation-burnishing purpose.
Ever since DA Pennebaker trained his camera on a newly electrified Bob Dylan in 1967’s Don’t Look Back, the value of a well-made music doc has been obvious, but the current climate is particularly welcoming for the genre. Live footage has never been easier to capture or archive footage simpler to upload and digitise. And with the number of people going to the cinema still significantly down since the pandemic, there’s an enthusiasm among exhibitors to show films that lure in fandoms, particularly younger ones, that cinemas might otherwise not reach.
With studios and streamers lining up to take on these projects, artists, or artists’ estates, can demand a share of control over the finished product, particularly if they’re the ones with the rights to archive material and the songs themselves. (Though, intriguingly, Oasis don’t seem to have demanded editorial control over Don’t Look Back in Anger; had they done so, you imagine they might have nixed the extended footage of one fan wearing a kit of the Gallagher brothers’ hated Manchester United.)
Looking at the sea of concert films and music documentaries released in the last year, a generational divide of sorts jumps out between the former and the latter. Younger artists, without much of a history to trumpet, are largely the subjects of concert films, where the kineticism of their live shows can be shown off, enticing fans who didn’t catch the actual gig to start saving up for that next tour. Older artists with extensive archives and a long, winding narrative to draw from are more likely to be profiled in documentaries, or documentary-concert film hybrids, where they make their case for a place in pop’s pantheon.
Don’t Look Back in Anger goes further than many of its peers, though, by suggesting the band’s music has grown beyond their control, becoming part of some sort of wider folk memory. “You want to be writing songs that people take and stick into their lives and go ‘It’s mine now’,” Liam says, and the documentary goes out of its way to show that transference, spending as much time with Oasis fans, from Argentinian football ultras to Korean oyster-divers, as it does with the Gallaghers. Perhaps its most stirring moment comes during the gigs in Manchester’s Heaton Park, where instead of paid-up fans, the cameras follow those clambering over fences for a communal ticketless sing-along of Bring It on Down, as if the music has passed from possession of the band to the wider public.
That framing may sound self-aggrandising, but we are shown compelling evidence: just witness the footage of Don’t Look Back in Anger (the song) being spontaneously sung at the vigil for the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. In another scene, a priest uses the Gallaghers’ reunion to highlight the importance of forgiveness – playing to the cameras, perhaps, but there’s a distinctly religious quality to some of the footage here: the ecstatic wailing of fans, the mass devotional sing-alongs.
Perhaps that’s the power of music – or a slickly produced documentary, at least: to make our ephemeral rock stars immortal.
